OPINION
In the early 2000s ‘Golden Age of Long-Form Television’, the first season of True Detective must surely rank as one of the greats. One part of its genius was that it worked effectively on multiple levels. On the surface level, it was a thoroughly disturbing slab of Southern Gothic, in which its protagonists gradually uncovered a shocking, ritualistic abuse and murder cult in the Louisiana swamps.
On another level, though, for those who knew, it was part of a pedigree of weird fiction that runs all the way back to one of the most remarkable books of the 19th century: The King in Yellow. Not that viewers need to know about the book: the show worked perfectly well without it, although its conclusion was otherwise baffling. Otherwise, its mysterious references to “Carcosa”, “the King in Yellow” and so on, were just part of the overall lurking sense of dread.
What is The King in Yellow? On its own, it’s a variously successful of seemingly unrelated short stories published by Robert W Chambers in 1895. The stories are all linked, often tenuously it is true, by a fictional play The King in Yellow that sends anyone who reads it fully, utterly mad.
But, the total effect of The King in Yellow is much more than the sum of its parts, and its greatest achievement is a legacy which has inspired some of the greatest writers in modern literature and even pop stars.
The first story and in my humble opinion the best “The Repairer of Reputations” is a master class in uncanny atmosphere, creeping dread and unreliable narration. It’s extremely rich in themes and future social commentary but the element that I’m really interested in for this video is the presence of a higher power and ancient Dynasty that will soon restore the Imperial Crown of America. The lifeblood of this conspiracy is the connection to the greater Cosmos, an even higher power that came from the Stars, an alien god if you will.
“The Repairer of Reputations” features many social aspects that are all too familiar to us, today: the story opens with the public fanfare of unveiling the first “Lethal Chamber”, a state-sanctioned euthanasia initiative. The titular “Repairer” is a kind of thoroughly repellent spin doctor. The story has as its background a United States that has slipped into an eerie prefiguration of Nazi Germany, including the expulsion of Jews and blacks, and the solving of the “Indian problem” by forcing them into a Cossack-style military brigade.
A significant plot element is that its narrator has suffered a head injury, lately been released from an asylum and then read the play that sends people mad. It’s a strong possibility, then, that the whole story is a madman’s delusion.
But it’s the play that expands the mythos of the Yellow King and overflows into the other short stories. We even get to read some of it – not all of it obviously, that would be a bad idea:
Along the shore the cloud waves break. The twin suns sink behind the lake. The Shadows lengthen in Carcosa. Strange is the night where black stars rise and strange moons circle through the skies. But stranger still is lost Carcosa.
So Robert Chambers is using this place, this other realm Carcosa, nestled within a forbidden play to almost legitimize the ramblings of a madman. It’s referred to in several of the short stories in The King in Yellow and it will eventually become a significantly fleshed out location once more authors get their hands on it.
And therein lies the greatness of The King in Yellow: its place in a literary lineage that stretches over a century and a half, and especially its influence on later writers and artists.
The names Carcosa, Hali and Hastur had all featured about a decade earlier in an Ambrose Bierce story, An inhabitant of Carcosa.
It’s a very weird tale about a man from that City who wakes up in an unfamiliar Wilderness and embarks on a personal and philosophical journey […] Another story in The King in Yellow, “The Mask”, is a direct homage to Edgar Alle Poe’s The Mask of the Red Death.
But Chambers is doing something much deeper than simply pilfering names and writing homages. He is running with the idea that there is a kind of “secret history”, a cosmic vision so bleak that if humans ever fully comprehended it, they’d just go mad. A later writer who ran with this idea became one of the greatest figures in 20th century American literature:
H P Lovecraft.
If you’re at all familiar with Lovecraft, you’ll have already recognised names like “Hali” and “Hastur”. Lovecraft read The King in Yellow in 1927, when he returned to his beloved home, Providence, Rhode Island, after a disastrous spell in New York. It was at this time that Lovecraft was reaching his creative peak.
The influence of Chambers stories can be seen all over the Lovecraft catalog: there is more of a commitment to a wider cosmic mythos and the inclusion of the King in Yellow himself, kind of. However the concept of pure fear being attributed to something utterly incomprehensible to humanity, or indeed the idea of a forbidden text or knowledge sending somebody completely mad, had been a hallmark of Lovecraft from the very beginning.
As many writers will be familiar with, there sometimes seems to be a phenomenon of tinkering with an idea, then stumbling on a previous work which fits it perfectly. Musically, Tom Ellard of Severed Heads once said to me that listening to the first Kraftwerk album had the same effect: “Like there was a space in my head shaped thus, and it just fit it perfectly.”
The development of the character himself becomes extremely complicated and even more mysterious once Lovecraft and his circle of friends start to reference the king himself and the mysterious cult that materialized around him. In “The Whisperer in Darkness” we get the first reference to Hastur, not labeled as The King in Yellow, but it’s the same thing. The forbidden play of the same name from Chamber’s stories gets incorporated into the Necronomicon, Lovecraft’s fictional Book of the [Names of the] Dead: itself a collection of stories and spells and laws that it’s rumored if you read it can send you mad. Although Lovecraft claimed that the idea for the Necronomicon came to him in a dream there is some evidence to show that that dream was The King in Yellow.
While Lovecraft continued to reference The King in Yellow, it was after his death that things really took off. His friend and first publisher, August Derleth, coined the phrase “Cthulu Mythos” to refer both to Lovecraft’s work and the ever-growing edifice of fiction that others continued to build on Lovecraft’s foundation.
In the 1980s, I was huge fan of new-wave musician Toyah. Her 1982 album, The Changeling, contains a apocalyptic song called The Packt. Its chorus nearly perfectly recites the few lines revealed by Chambers from The King in Yellow. That remarkable book was still making its influence felt.
Which brings us to 2014, and season one of True Detective.
The genius of the show is that it completely holds together on its own. I bet 99 per cent of the audience has no idea who The King in Yellow is, or what Carcosa and the Yellow Sign means. The focus of the show is the characters and the story the most intriguing ties to The King in Yellow are completely overshadowed by the relationship between Marty [Woody Harrelson] and Rust [Matthew McConaughey], the pessimistic ramblings, and the procedure of actually solving the case. But now I know that the Yellow King has 130 years of history and baggage […]
My experience with The King in Yellow and the Lovecraftian aspect takes True Detective to a newer much higher level. Now I see the complex manipulation of the audience that Robert Chambers achieved in “The Repairer of Reputations” echoed here. I see double meaning in the actions and predicament of the characters in particular Rust Cole: he gradually slides towards oblivion as the series progresses, mentally and physically coming undone.
Media Death Cult/YouTube
The connection to The King in Yellow also elevates the story of True Detective. What might otherwise have just been a particularly horrible set of sex-murders perpetrated by lunatic swamp dwellers becomes, instead, part of a horrifying, bleak cosmic mythology.